Along the Infinite Sea (7 page)

ISOLDE
•
1935

1.

The doctor arrived over the side of the boat just after I laid Stefan out on the deck and loosened the tourniquet.

“Why did you loosen this?” he demanded, dropping his bag on the deck and stripping his jacket.

“Because it had been on for well over half an hour. I wanted to save the leg.”

“There is no use saving the leg if the patient bleeds to death.”

At which point Stefan opened one eye and told the esteemed doctor he wanted to keep his fucking leg, and if the esteemed doctor couldn't speak with respect to the woman who had saved Stefan's life, the esteemed doctor could walk the fucking plank with a bucket of dead fish hanging around his neck to attract the sharks.

The doctor said nothing, and I assisted him right there on the deck as he dug into the hole and extracted the bullet, as he cleaned and stitched up the wound and Stefan drifted in and out of consciousness,
always waking up with a faint start and a mumbled apology, as if he had somehow betrayed us by not remaining alert while the forceps dug into his raw flesh and the antiseptic was poured over afterward.

“You are a lucky man, Silverman,” said the doctor, dropping the small metal bullet into a towel, and I thought, Silverman, Stefan Silverman, that's his name, and wiped away the gathering perspiration on his broad forehead.

The doctor asked for the sutures, and I rooted through the bag and laid everything out on the towel next to Stefan's arm: sutures, needle, antiseptic. “What's your blood type, nurse?” the doctor asked as he worked, as I silently handed him each suture, and I said I was O negative, and he replied: “Good, what I hoped you would say. Can you spare a pint, do you think?” and I said I could, of course, of course. I was glowing a little, in my heart, because he had called me
nurse
, and no one had ever called me anything useful before. And because I had brought Stefan Silverman safely to his ship through the dark and the salt wind, and the doctor was efficiently fixing him, putting his leg back together again, and the ball of terror was beginning to drop away from my belly at last.

The doctor stood at last and told me that he was finished, and I should dress the wound. “Not too tight; you nurses are always dressing a wound too tight. I will have to come back with the transfusion equipment. It may take an hour or two. Can you stay awake with him?”

Yes, I could.

“Then we will put him in his bed.” He signaled for one of the crew, who were hovering anxiously nearby, and somehow made himself clear with gestures and a few scant words of German. Two of the men hoisted Stefan up—he was out cold by now, his dark head turned to one side—and the doctor yelled at them to be careful. He turned to me. “Don't leave his side for a second. You know what to look for, I think? Signs of shock?”

“Yes. I will watch him like a child, I promise.”

2.

He
did
look like a child, lying there on his clean white bed, when I had tucked the sheets around his bare chest, and his face was so pale and peaceful I checked his pulse and his breathing every minute or so to make certain he hadn't died. I turned off the electric light overhead and kept only the small lamp burning next to his bed, just enough to see him by. His skin was smooth, only a few faint lines about the eyes, and his hair was quite dark, curling wetly around his ears and forehead. He was about my brother's age, I thought, twenty-three or -four. His lashes were long and dark, lying against his cheek, and I wondered what color his eyes were. Stefan Silverman's eyes. When I touched his shoulder, his lids fluttered.

“Shh,” I said. “Go to sleep.”

He opened those eyes just long enough for me to decide that they were probably brown, but a very light brown, like a salt caramel. He tried to focus and I thought he failed, because his lids dropped again and his head turned an inch or two to the side, away from me.

But then he said, almost without moving his lips: “Stay, Mademoiselle.”

I smoothed the sheets against his chest, an excuse to touch him. He smelled of gin and antiseptic. I thought, It's like waiting forever for the film to start, and then it does.

“As long as you need me,” I told him.

3.

At half past eight o'clock in the morning, Stefan's mistress arrived.

Or so I assumed. I could hear a woman on the other side of the cabin door, shrill and furious like a mistress. She was remonstrating with someone in French (of course), and her opponent was speaking
back to her in German. Stefan opened his eyes and stared, frowning, at the ceiling.

“I think you have a visitor,” I said.

He sighed. “Can you give us a minute or two, Mademoiselle?”

“You shouldn't see anyone. You have lost so much blood. You need to rest.”

“Yes, but I'm feeling better now.”

I wanted to remind him that he was feeling better only because he had a pint of Annabelle de Créouville coursing through his veins. I rose to my feet—a little carefully, because a pint of blood meant a great deal more to me than it did to him—and went to the door.

The woman stopped shrilling when she saw me. She was dressed in a long and shimmering evening gown, and her hair was a little disordered. There was a diamond clip holding back a handful of once-sleek curls at her temple, and a circle of matching diamonds around her neck. Her lipstick was long gone. Her eyes flicked up and down, taking me in, exposing the line of smudged kohl on her upper lid. “And who are you?” she asked, in haughty French, though I could tell from her accent that she was English.

“His nurse.”

“I must see him.”

I stood back from the door. “Five minutes,” I said, in my sternest ward sister voice, “and if you upset him even the smallest amount, if I hear so much as a single
word
through this door, I will open your veins and bathe in your blood.”

I must have looked as if I meant it, for she ducked through the door like a frightened rabbit, and when six minutes had passed without a single sound, I knocked briefly on the door and opened it.

Stefan lay quite still on the bed. His eyes were closed, and the woman's hand rested in his palm. She was curled in the armchair—
my
armchair, I thought fiercely—and she didn't look up when I entered. “He is so pale,” she said, and her voice was rough. “I have never seen him like this. He is always so vital.”

“As I said, he has lost a great deal of blood.”

“May I sit with him a little longer?”

She said it humbly, the haughtiness dissolved, and when she tilted her head in my direction and accepted my gaze, I saw a track of gray kohl running down from the corner of her eye to the curve of her cheekbone. She had dark blond hair the color of honey, and it gleamed dully in the lamplight. Her gown was cut into a V so low, I could count the ribs below her breasts. I looked at Stefan's hand holding hers, and I said, “Yes, a little longer,” and went back out the door and down the narrow corridor to the stern of the ship, which was pointed toward the exposed turrets of the Fort Royal on the Île Sainte-Marguerite, where the Man in the Iron Mask had spent a decade of his life in a special isolated cell, though no one ever knew who he was or why he was there. Whether he had a family who mourned him.

4.

I had sent a note for Charles with the departing doctor, in the small hours of the morning, and I expected my brother any moment to arrive on the yacht, to assure himself of Stefan's survival and to bring me home.

But lunchtime came and went, the disheveled blonde departed, and though someone brought me a tray of food, and a bowl of hot broth for Stefan, Charles never appeared.

Stefan slept. At six o'clock, a boat hailed the deck and the doctor's head popped over the side, followed by his bag. The day had been warm, and the air was still hot and laden with moisture. “How is our patient this evening?” he asked.

“Much better.” I turned and led him down the hallway to Stefan's commodious stateroom. “He's slept most of the day and had a little broth.” I didn't mention the woman.

“Excellent, excellent. Sleep is the best thing for him. Pulse? Temperature?”

“All normal. The pulse is slow, but not alarmingly so.”

“To be expected. He is an active man. Well, well,” he said, ducking through the door, “how is our intrepid hero, eh?”

Stefan was awake, propped up on his pillows. He shot the doctor the kind of look that parents send each other when children are present, and listening too closely. The doctor glanced at me, cleared his throat, and set his bag on the end of the bed.

“Now, then,” he said, “let us take a look at this little scratch of yours.”

On the way back to the boat, the doctor gave me a list of instructions: sleep, food, signs of trouble. “He is quite strong, however, and I should not be surprised if he is up and about in a matter of days. I shall send over a pair of crutches. You will see that he does not overexert himself, please.”

“I don't understand. I had no expectation of staying longer than a day.”

The doctor stopped in his tracks and turned to me. “What's this?”

“I gave you a message, to give to my brother. Wasn't there a reply? Isn't he coming for me?”

He pushed his spectacles up his nose and blinked slowly. The sun was beginning to touch the cliffs to the west, and the orange light surrounded his hair. The deck around us was neat and shining, bleached to the color of bone, smelling of tar and sunshine. “Coming for you? Of course not. You are to care for the patient. Who else is to do it?”

“But I'll be missed,” I said helplessly. “My father— You must know who I am. I can't just disappear.”

The doctor turned and resumed his journey across the deck to the ladder, where his tender lay bobbing in the
Isolde
's lee. “My dear girl, this is nothing that young Créouville cannot explain. He is a clever fellow. No doubt he has already put about a suitable story.”

“But I don't understand. What's going on? What sort of trouble is this?”

“I don't know what you mean,” he said virtuously.

“Yes, you do. What sort of trouble gets a man shot in the night like that, everything a big secret, and what . . . what does my
brother
have to do with any of it? And why the devil are you smiling that way, like a cat?”

“Because I am astonished, Mademoiselle, and not a little filled with admiration, that you have undertaken this little adventure with no knowledge whatever of its meaning.”

We had reached the ladder. I grabbed him by the arm and turned him around. “Then perhaps you might begin by explaining it to me.”

He shook his head and patted my cheek. His eyes were kind, and the smile had disappeared. “I cannot, of course. But when the patient is a little more recovered, it's my professional opinion that you have every right to ask him yourself.”

5.

The next day, Stefan roared for his crutches, an excellent sign, but I wouldn't let him have them. I made him eat two eggs for breakfast and a little more beef broth, and he grumbled and ate. I told him that if he were very good and rested quietly, I would let him try out the crutches tomorrow. He glared with his salt caramel eyes and directed me to go to the
Isolde
's library and bring him some books. He wrote down their titles on a piece of paper.

The weather was hot again today, the sun like a blister in the fierce blue sky, and every porthole was open to the cooling breeze off the water. I passed along the silent corridor to the grand staircase, a sleek modern fusion of chrome and white marble, filled with seething Mediterranean light, and the library was exactly where Stefan said it should be: the other side of the main salon.

It was locked, but Stefan had given me the key. I opened the door expecting the usual half-stocked library of the yachting class: the shelves occupied by a few token volumes and a great many valuable
objets
of a maritime theme, the furniture arranged for style instead of a comfortable hours-long submersion between a pair of cloth covers.

But the
Isolde
's library wasn't like the rest of the ship. There was nothing sleek about it, nothing constructed out of shiny material. The walnut shelves wrapped around the walls, stuffed with books, newer ones and older ones, held in place by slim wooden rails in case of stormy seas. A sofa and a pair of armchairs dozed near the portholes, and a small walnut desk sat on the other side, next to a cabinet that briefly interrupted the flow of shelving. I thought, Now, here is a room I might like to live in.

I looked down at the paper in my hand. Goethe,
Die Leiden des jungen Werthers
; Locke,
Some Thoughts Concerning Education
. Dumas
père, Le vicomte de Bragelonne, ou Dix ans plus tard
.

When I returned to Stefan's cabin a half hour later, he was sitting up against the pillows and staring at the porthole opposite, which was open to the breeze. The rooftops of the fort shifted in and out of the frame, nearly white in the sunshine. It was too hot for blankets, and he lay in his pajamas on the bed I had made expertly underneath him that morning, tight as a drum. “Here are your books,” I said.

“Thank you.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Like a bear in a cage.”

“You are certainly
acting
like a bear.”

He looked up from the books. “I'm sorry.”

“I've had worse patients. It's good that you're a bear. Better a bear than a sick little worm.”

“Poor Mademoiselle de Créouville. I understand your brother has ordered you to stay with me and nurse me back to health.”

“Not in so many words.” I paused. “Not in any words at all, really. He sent over a few clothes and a toothbrush yesterday, with the doctor,
but there was no note of any kind. I still haven't the faintest idea who you are, or what I'm doing here.”